Led by Tinder, a Surge in Mobile Dating Apps

BLESS or curse the smartphone, but you can’t doubt its impact. Even digital dating has become a hand-held activity.

Online dating, long dominated by big outfits like Match.com and eHarmony, has in the last two years been transformed by the rise of Tinder, the mobile phone app that lets its users scan photos and short profiles of potential dates.

Then, as easy as a swipe of a finger, you can decide if you want to chat or pass on a prospect.

But Tinder’s free app isn’t the only mobile dating game in town. Many app makers are trying to capitalize on the Tinder method of simple, smartphone-based dating. Of course, they add a twist to the swipe.

An app called Hinge sifts only through your Facebook connections for friends of friends. Clover offers Tinder-like features but with an added, if dubious, bonus called “On-Demand Dating.” Think Uber for dating — you pick a location and a date, and Clover sends someone to meet you.

And there are others with variations on the theme, including How About We, where you pose an idea for a fun date and see who bites, and the League, sort of a mobile dating app for the 1 percent: it promotes exclusivity and a carefully selected clientele.

“Because there’s such an increase in smartphone usage, it directly relates to the increase in dating app usage,” said Julie Spira, an online dating guru who runs a site called Cyber-Dating Expert. “People are dating on the fly, they’re dating in real time, they’re hooking up or meeting for dates, they’re doing both. Same day, same hour.”

It’s easier, faster and more discreet to swipe through an app than to create laborious online profiles. The downside of that convenience is uncertainty, since mobile profiles tend to be sparse or nonexistent.

Still, this simplicity has caused Tinder’s growth to explode in just two years. According to the company, it processes more than one billion swipes a day and matches some 12 million people a day. A “match” means two people agreed they were interested in one another. From there, they can choose whether to exchange messages or meet in person.

Traditional dating sites like Match.com, eHarmony and OkCupid also have apps that let their users keep tabs on their profiles, messages and matches, of course. In fact Tinder, Match and OkCupid, among other dating sites, are all part of the IAC/InterActiveCorp media conglomerate.

Amarnath Thombre, president of Match.com in North America, said that in the last year it had registered a 35 percent increase in the people who use Match through the app each month, and a 109 percent increase in the number of people who use only the app to reach Match every month. But he acknowledged that Tinder was creating an entirely new audience of digital daters.

“What Tinder especially has accomplished, which I think none of our competitors could achieve before, is that it opened up this young demographic — 18- to 25-year-olds — that no product could open up before,” Mr. Thombre said.

While Tinder, which may eventually add a premium service for a fee, has had a reputation as a way to find casual encounters, it appears to be moving beyond that. I found plenty of people my own age using the app, including quite a few friends and acquaintances. And some are even finding love on Tinder.

“I heard about Tinder in a funny, joking, laugh-about-it way,” said Sara Chamberlin, a 31-year-old marketing manager in San Francisco. “But I started hearing that friends of mine had met significant others on this app, and I thought, maybe it’s not just this hookup thing. It’s for finding relationships.”

Ms. Chamberlin met her boyfriend on Tinder. They’ve been dating about a year, she said, and are preparing to move in together.

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“The thing that I appreciated the most was efficiency, and just the lack of pressure to come up with this persona,” she said. “The very thing that made it feel seedy and not like a good idea is the exact reason I liked it so much — how casual it was.”

Tinder is indeed easy, casual and fun. In the interest of, ahem, research, I set up profiles on Tinder and then one on OkCupid, the popular free online dating site, as well as Match.com.

To use Tinder, you must have a Facebook account. Most Facebook profiles are tied to real identities and real names, and the app shows you if you have friends in common.

To set up a profile, you log in using your Facebook credentials and then choose a few photos from the collection you have on the site. Tinder will automatically fill in a few for you. Then, you enter a short bio — or leave it blank, as some people do when they’re relying solely on their looks.

After that short setup, which takes just a few minutes depending on how much time you spend writing your profile or choosing photos, you can set search parameters like distance from you, age and gender. And then you just start swiping through pictures of potential matches. You tap one for more information, and if you like them, swipe right. If you want to move on, swipe left.

If you match with someone — you both swipe right — you see a little pop-up that says you can either send a message or “keep playing.” In that way, Tinder really is like a game.

One thing I particularly liked about Tinder: no one can send you a message unless you both like each other. It’s an instant filter.

Setting up an OkCupid profile is significantly more work and requires much more personal information. The first step — choosing a profile name — is a stumper. Between all the names that are already taken and the myriad sites offering advice on choosing an effective one, it might be easier to just use your name.

OkCupid also wants users to answer up to thousands of questions so it can narrow down matches with greater accuracy. Match.com doesn’t have page after page of questions, but does push you to add more and more information to your profile.

Then there are the long profiles of potential matches to read, messages to sift through or delete, and a barrage of communication from the sites themselves. Managing an online dating profile can feel like a full-time job; Tinder is more like a little hobby.

However, Ms. Spira, the online dating expert, says that people who use Tinder are also using other dating sites, sometimes even paying for memberships. Mr. Thombre confirmed that many Tinder users were also Match or OkCupid users, either at the same time or after they give up on one and move on to the next.

And Ms. Spira said that having easy access to lots of different dates actually increases your odds of eventually finding a match.

“It’s making dates happen a lot more quickly,” she said. “The more dates you go on, the better dater you become, so let mobile dating apps become your new best friend.”

Correction: February 6, 2015

An article in the Personal Tech pages on Thursday about dating apps misstated, in some copies, the surname of an online dating guru in two instances. She is Julie Spira, not Stira.

A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2015, on Page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Led by Tinder, the Mobile Dating Game Surges. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe